Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday January 26, 2011 @02:46PM
from the there-good-enough-and-smart-enough dept.

eldavojohn writes "Remember when Verizon sued the FCC over net neutrality rules? Well, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Al Franken (D-MN) see it a bit differently and have authored a new working bill titled 'Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of 2011 (PDF).' The bill lays out some stark clarity on what is meant by Net Neutrality by outright banning ISPs from doing many things including '(6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets; (7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization... (9) refus[ing] to interconnect on just and reasonable terms and conditions.' And that doesn't count for packets sent over just the internet connections but also wireless, radio, cell phone or pigeon carrier. Franken has constantly reiterated that this is the free speech issue of our time and Cantwell said, 'If we let telecom oligarchs control access to the Internet, consumers will lose. The actions that the FCC and Congress take now will set the ground rules for competition on the broadband Internet, impacting innovation, investment, and jobs for years to come. My bill returns the broadband cop back to the beat, and creates the same set of obligations regardless of how consumers get their broadband.'"

I seriously hope you're joking that these are private networks. They get paid subsidies by the government to provide these service. They are publicly funded. If they don't want to be regulated, they can pay back all the public money and tax credits they took to build the infrastructure. Until then, they need to shutup and do the job we've been paying them to do.

What Galestar has already said. If you're serious, you need to take a look at the REAL business world. I feel safe in stating that every single ISP in America has accepted tax subsidies from the government. That is to say, they've built their networks with your money, my money, everyone's money.
You can't run a monopoly in this country, and expect to make all the rules without government regulation.
As the article states - this is the "free speech issue" of our times. For the first time in history, the little peons and nobodies of the world can have a voice that reaches around the world. Prior to the internet, to make your voice heard 'round the world, you had to have money, fame, fortune, or a ham radio. Today, all I need is a portion of a paycheck to pay for a computer, and pay a recurring fee for internet access. Free speech. Everyone should be free to access the content that they desire, and to express themselves in whatever way they desire. Everyone - not just the people who can cough up the dough that the ISP demands for that "privilege".

Honestly at this point in my life I'd rather have someone who is just an honest and decent person rather than someone who claims to subscribe to my personal political views. That's basically the reason I'd vote for either Franken or Paul. Both are a bit nutty and at opposite ends of the political spectrum for sure, but (imo) honest decent guys who would do what they could to make things "right". They'd do it in diametrically opposed ways, but there's more than one way to skin a cat.

You know, I personally think Al Franken would make a great president. He is level-headed, understands middle- and working-class Americans, and has more common sense than most of Washington put together. But it will never happen. Yeah, it may have shocked some folks when Ronald Reagan (the actor) began to have some success in politics, but Franken is a different type of character. An opposing party's followers will never take a comedy writer/comedic actor/political satirist seriously. And he's a Jew, which w

This makes no sense and is the very core of the problem with our current political system. If Al Franken shares your views on big issues and also holds a seat in congress, then you should support Al Franken. If he does not share you views, then kick him out. Supporting a corrupt, incestuous oligarchy is EXACTLY THE FUCKING PROBLEM WITH THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW. Who gives a shit if the man was born to be a politician or if he was born to be a comedian? If he's right, then he's right.

Franken is one of those comedians who, with age, has gotten less and less funny and more and more nutball. Most of them are SNL alum too, which must say something about the mental toll of being on that show. Dennis Miller and Janeane Garofalo, I'm looking in your direction.

But on this and the Comcast/NBC merger, the guy is dead on. Who better to appreciate the depths of evil at NBC than a SNL alum, after all?

I don't see it (Franken, at least). His books are the thing that switched my political reality. And they are funny. There's nothing nutball about his political stances--nothing along the nutball levels of a Glen Beck or Michele Bachmann, at least.

Miller and Garofalo were never funny to begin with, so the argument they are no longer funny is invalid;-)

I knew Dennis Miller had completely gone to the dark side when watching the first episode of The Dennis Miller Show. He was interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger and asked the hard hitting question: "Governor, why don't people realize how awesome you are?".

The very fact that Glenn Beck airs such crazy outbursts of "other people" shows his tacit support of such things. They are being the messenger to get the message heard.

We should not be hearing these messages. Messages invoking violence, murder, or the stupidity of calling out Obama's birth origin.

If Al Franken is a crazy son of a bitch, the message he's trying to get across is the one I agree with. So if it takes a crazy son of a bitch to get that message across, by all means, Mr. Franken, go nuts.

I'm going to have to remember that one. "You should try opening your eyes for a change." It's sort of like, "...because your stupid, that's why!" Except "You should try opening your eyes" has more class. There is just no comeback for "You should try opening your eyes."

I think he's mainly talking about the way that O'Reily goes absolutely apeshipt about Al Franken. It's common knowlege that O'Reily only goes apeshit over nutballs, therefore Franken must be a nutball.

Also Franken has poor taste in ties. It's absolutely unacceptable for a Senator to wear ugly ties.

There is a line that any entertainer can cross where self-righteousness about some cause, combined with their innate narcissism, turns them from a talent into an insufferable bore. With comedians this seems to often take the form of the once funny comic talent whose stand-up routines evolve from funny routines, with some political content, into full-on raving diatribes where not a laugh is heard. Franken (and many others like Miller and Garafalo) was at one point a guy you would have on your show to make fu

Franken hasn't billed himself as a "comedian" in well over a decade. Unlike the very unfunny Dennis Miller, who still tries to do standup, mostly in front of audiences who know him from his right-wing radio show. For them, showing up at Miller's shows is more of a tribal identifier than comedy consumption.

For the most part, Franken was always more of a writer than a performer and anyway, he left the comedy business a good while ago, though you could say the U.S. Senate is pretty comical.

I didn't think Franken sounded any better than Coleman in the last election and voted for the devil I knew.

I must say that I have been shocked to see his name so often attached to great ideas (actual NN, ending ACTA secrecy, etc.). I will definitely be sending my vote his way next time around; I think he is one of the few senators with people's rights actually guiding him.

The problem is that all telcos are waiting US decision to very soon spread those policies around the world. Will be very difficult to revert once they have control over all internet information. Besides, there is a deeper problem illustrated by two Brazilian episodes: 1) YouTube was blocked to the whole country due a decision involving a celebrity sex video (really). 2) Telcos already advertise promotions like "free social network access", not to mention dozen of lawsuits against Orkut for cloned profile, etc.

Putting all together: As soon as telcos start to dictate internet's tone, will be much easier for governments to implement restrictions without consulting people's right or even the content/service provider.

"Telcos" can regulate their private networks however they want. You are merely paying for an IP address from their servers as a privilege. Calling on politicians to tell sysadmins how to regulate their network traffic is totally insane.

If you give the government power to regulate the internet, it's going to be a field day of DMCA takedowns, piracy site takedowns, and more. Every lobbyist with access to government politicians is going to "dictate internet's tone." Governments are the most corrupt organizatio

The key is that everyone should get what they pay for. If I pay for 768kbps, then I should get at least 768kbps. If google wants to pay extra, then I'm ok with google gettting to me at 2mbps, but not with google paying my ISP so that yahoo only comes to me at 250kbps.

I should get what I pay for.
Google should get what they pay for.
Party X should not be able to pay for party Y to get less than what has been paid for.

So you're saying that "up to" means "at least"? Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times? Now you want the government to change the service level of a shared circuit to that of a dedicated circuit? Any idea what this does to prices? Any idea how you'd actually achieve this, since it's impossible to build a core network that can handle all the concurrent data that the end points can throw at it?

DSL isn't really better. DSL is constrained to sharing the CO's link to their backbone just as cable connections are constrained to sharing a cable node's link to their backbone, the only difference is where it's located.

In addition to that, both are constrained to the interconnects their backbones have to the other parts of the internet, which is quite often a bigger issue than the last mile bandwidth constraints.

I don't think it's so cut and dry. In particular when the DSL provider is the incumbent telco. Starting from interconnecting issues to the backdones. Not a single cable company has a Tier 1 network. Whereas Qwest, Verizon/UUNet, Sprint, and AT&T are all Tier 1 networks. Cable Companies are strictly Tier 2, often buying connectivity from the Telco companies they compete with for consumer customers.

Cable doesn't have the infrastructure and redundancy most Telco DSL networks have. Telcos started putti

Advertise 3 numbers - minimum guaranteed, average (that is achievable over, say, a day) and peak bandwidth. That would reduce the confusion greatly.

For example, my connection is advertised as "up to" 80mbps (up/down), which is great. I manage to get about 32mbps average and the bandwidth sometimes (for a few hours every day) drops down to 10mbps (let's assume this is due to the ISP). I still think that my connection is great, especially for what I pay for it. However, the ad could have said 10/30/80 mbps (min/avg/max). The contract actually specifies a minimum guaranteed bandwidth, but I am too lazy to go now and look it up.

They don't advertise at least x Mbps, they advertise "up to" 6 Mbps for example. I got my mom a 6 Mbps U-verse connection and found that their advertising wasn't accurate. Turned out that they gave her 7 Mbps which is generally sustainable even over a long duration. However, I don't expect 7 or 6 Mbps to be an "at least" number.

So you're saying that "up to" means "at least"? Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times? Now you want the government to change the service level of a shared circuit to that of a dedicated circuit? Any idea what this does to prices? Any idea how you'd actually achieve this, since it's impossible to build a core network that can handle all the concurrent data that the end points can throw at it?

If dedicated lines are prohibitively expensive and an extremely robust "core network" impossible to build, why can so many service providers in northern Europe and southeast Asia provide an extremely consistent 100+ mbps, even at night when virtually everyone is online (say in South Korea), to every single household for anywhere from $10-$50/month? I understand that truly dedicated bandwidth costs more, but it's bullshit to claim that pure economics dictate paying $60+ per month for something that's been s

What you are saying is that it's "impossible" for it to cost more than $60 per month for 1/20th or 1/40th of a dedicated line.

Quick math. DS3's (45Mbps) cost around $3500 per month. Order 1 DS3 for every 9 people (9 people at 5Mbs = 45Mbs) = $388.89 per month per person. Feel free to get you and your closest 8 neighbors to cough up $388.89 per person (not including router, and cables to each house beyond the first), and you can get yourself a 5Mbps connection that you can do whatever you want with, and t

Very good analysis of the fundamental principle at stake. Said that way, it is very clear that the purpose of Net Neutrality is to defend the free market from those who would bias it, not to inhibit the free market. That is exactly the sort of illumination that ought to send the anti-free-market rats scurrying.

Thank you.

If I may offer one slight modification:

"Party X should not be able to pay party Y to cause party Z to get less than what party Z paid for."

That's exactly the problem though. You aren't getting what you paid for. The equipment you're internet connection is so over sold that its impossible for the ISP to give you the speed they're selling. That's why they now call it "Up to 768k!" If you're paying for 768k, you should be able to get that any time of day or night to any website that can also provide that speed.The biggest laugh in this whole net neutrality is the premise that ISPs have sold a customer a service that they can not provide. Then the

The other side of that argument is that group discounts is good for both the provider and consumer. A large reliable income for the provider and an overall reduced price for the customer....assuming the consumer uses the service.

I liken it to heath insurance. Much cheaper in groups, but the healthier people lose out because they pay for the unhealthy.

Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have? It's embarrassing that this guy has to come to Washington to kick some sense into them just because our elite educational institutions have been pumping out the smartest dumb fucks on the planet for years.

Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have? It's embarrassing that this guy has to come to Washington to kick some sense into them just because our elite educational institutions have been pumping out the smartest dumb fucks on the planet for years.

Is it really? Usually the best way to get the pulse of the public is to see what comedians are joking about. They can rip people a new arsehole from behind the guise of comedy, and nobody really gives a crap. Now if $yourFavoriteTalkingHead does the same thing, they in turn get ripped a new arsehole by $theOpposingViewTalkingHead and it goes into a shouting match on the Today Show.

I'm all for level headed comedian policy makers. I would have moved across the river to Minnesota to vote for Frankin, I had to watch all his ads anyway;)

Actually, I'd almost be willing to bet that he's above the 80'th percentile for intelligence in the Senate. You need to have some serious brain power to turn out comedy week-after-week for years, especially of the more cerebral stuff that he did.

I think he's using the system the way it's supposed to be used. He wanted to change something so he became a politician to try to change it. I'm not too familiar with this guy so while I can't back up the things he has done before this, I am greatly pleased with what he has done regarding this bill.

I think QoS could add some amount of value, but I think it needs to be carefully.

I have an idea of how QoS might be implemented in a "fair" manner.

I Win7, I know you can assign QoS to an App or data stream. Let an ISP have 3 different priorities.

1) High priority would be a guaranteed bandwidth that a customer gets. An example of this might be I have a 2Mb up on my connection. I might only have 192Kb of "dedicated" bandwidth because ISPs over subscribes. I can assign on my machine to flag a packet to have hi

...then why do they pass laws and ordinances mandating their existence? If you don't believe me, try starting your own phone or cable company sometime.

I love it when government passes laws adding new regulations to solve problems created by government rather than just fixing their initial mistakes. The closest we got to to sanity was the AT&T breakup by the Judicial branch, but the legislative and executive branches were bought off sufficiently bought to more or less undo all of the good done there.

Because some markets are natural monopolies [wikipedia.org] in which the most economically efficient outcome is in fact a monopoly.

The supply curve you were probably taught in econ 101 is upward sloping, but that's actually a not-always true simplification. For instance, the supply curve of computer software is actually downward sloping, because higher numbers of customers = a lower cost to produce the software per customer. Most supply curves are actually an upward-sloping parabola, where the economies of scale create the

We need an extension so this hits them too.It wont be long before VZW has a Unlimited Slashdot service*
*This service entitles you to to read unlimited idle.slashdot.org stories. All other content from this website will be charged $0.20 per story

Or rather, manufacturing doesn't fuel jobs any more than any other job fuels jobs. What idiots usually mean when they say this is that manufacturing makes things people can hold, actual physical products, but that has nothing to with anything. People buy what they want. Whether they spend $10 on a movie ticket or a toaster or cell phone minutes, they still spend $10. Someone else gets that $10, spends it on resources used to sell the service or product that was bought.

Manufacturing does in a way fuel jobs, in that it produces new goods that bring in money external to the local economy. You can't support an economy composed entirely of service personnel unless there's a great outside desire for the service (read: tourist traps, Vegas, and the like). The money incoming from manufacturing however has a greater tendency to come in from outside the local environment, and money flowing into an area rather than circulating around it creates demand for additional services and

The bill lays out some stark clarity on what is meant by Net Neutrality by outright banning ISPs from doing many things including...(7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization.

Hopefully the bill will specify that's an opt-in request, not an opt-out.

... the way ISPs (and other utilities) work so that we can actually have real competition. Competition would basically fix this sort of thing, wouldn't it? Droves of people don't want X-ISP because X-ISP is throttling/sniffing/whatever traffic. Y-ISP comes in and advertises they don't do that (and in fact, they don't). Droves of people switch to Y-ISP.

Right now, though, because of the way ISPs share (or don't share) infrastructure and all that, we don't have competition; we have local monopolies. The fact that we allow local monopolies is why we now are struggling to regulate them; regulation may not be required, though, if we actually had competition. By "competition" I mean competition for the same customer using the same - more or less - technology; e.g., one person looking for cable can actually buy from multiple providers.

Maybe I misunderstand how it works right now, but it seems to me that allowing local monopolies is a bad idea and is the only reason we are having to go down the regulation route. Maybe if the infrastructure were public and paid for through $x-per-customer-served by the provider, thus allowing multiple providers access to the same infrastructure at the same cost (and that cost going to the local government, which would be maintaining/improving/whatever the infrastructure), we wouldn't have need for all this?

I think VOIP and streaming movies SHOULD get priority over bittorrent traffic as long all VOIP and streaming movie vendors are treated equally whether its youtube, netflix or comcast or my calls are made on skype or at&t.

Net Neutrality has so many definitions floating around that it's to confusing to bother with. Until now. Despite the fact that it's a very hard-to-read sentence, I think this is actually what a violation of net neutrality: "6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets". Let's just make that illegal and forget the rest.

Corporate, religious, or special interest control of access to content, information, news media is un-American and conflicts with The USA Constitutional freedom to speak, practice a religion, obtain information on science, weapons and/or art.

If you are against Net-Neutrality, then you are against US and all folks who stand for patriotism and the American way of life.

It reduces my existence down to the one-dimensional act of consuming. Makes me feel like some sort of herd animal grazing on whatever slop the farmer is throwing in front of my face.

Granted, there is utility in only focusing on one dimension when that's the one being, ahem, focused on. For example, IT calls the individuals who operate computers "users."

But from an economic standpoint, it is dangerous to reduce people to consumers, because it locks you into thinking that that is their actual purpose for existence. We see this a lot now: that consumption = good, and any diminution in consumption is somehow bad.

After all, "We built this internet one Dial-UP account at a time" for the last 20 or 30 years. We built the carriers and ISPs with our dollars. We hired them to run it, not to own it.

They run infrastructure thru right-of-way corridors granted by us, and send content thru the airways granted by us, and we pay the bills. Every month. Between cellular and internet connections most geeks pay well north of $100 per month to these companies. Its time we had our say.

The truth is, ISPs need happy customers, or else they will lose them to other ISPs.

Uhh, which other ISPs would they lose the customers to? Very few communities have any sort of choice when it comes to broadband. So the wallet-voting you're proposing is for everyone to go without any sort of broadband access? Good luck with that.

Many of the democratic lawmakers like to paint ISPs as if they were villains out to screw us as much as possible.

Wait, you think we all had to wait for the Democrats to tell us that AT&T and Comcast were "villains out to screw us as much as possible"? Have you ever read any of the contracts or end-user agreements from them? Being "out to screw you as much as possible" is in their corporate charter for chrissake.

Nope. This is a pretty nice area of Brooklyn. You know, in the largest city in the US.

Things are slightly better at the office. At that address we've got two ISP choices. Of course one of them is DSL that tops out at only 3 Mbps.

If the government to built out some sort of nation-wide publicly owned fiber network and let a few thousand ISPs compete to provide Internet access over it, the market could solve these problems. But as long as ISPs own the lines -- line ownership being something pretty damn close to a natural monopoly -- consumers need legislative protection from them.

Don't know how it works in the US actually but over here in Europe things like emergency calls and communications vital to national security and such tend to always have priority. So you could just make a law that says you can't mess with the flow of traffic unless it is necessary in order to ensure that emergency calls get through (with proper legalese wording of course).

unless it is necessary in order to ensure that emergency calls get through (with proper legalese wording of course).

And that's why I'm so skeptical of Net Neutrality. Oh, sure it will be great for a while, but eventually regulations will allow, or even require, different packets to get different priority, and as with all other industries, it's only a matter of time before the big players are the ones writing those regulations. "Proper legalese wording" always ends up being "wording chosen by industry" given enough time.

But the US is not a free market. It's a big corporation market. It's more Adam Smith than the old Soviet Union, but only barely. I dare say that in many ways, Red China is more Adam Smith than the US, but only because they are growing so fast they don't have time to implement the bureaucracies necessary to slow it down.

(7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization..

I'm not sure about the legality of prioritizing VoIP traffic under these rules, but if it's illegal to prioritize VoIP traffic, it's not really a problem. VoIP currently works just fine with no prioritization, and that's before you adjust your router's QoS rules.

In fact I'd say it would be better to make traffic prioritization by type illegal to shut the door on any potential future loopholes ("Comcast gives ComCastVPN packets higher priority than all other traffic! Get your ComCastVPN router today! Standar

So will this eliminate caps, and thus make my connection to an important site vulnerable to my neighbors whim to download a big binary?

Should have addressed this in my other reply...but you could run into that situation with or without caps, as long as your connection is oversold.

A cap is basically just a way of false-advertising a limited connection with an allowance for burst speeds as an unlimited connection (which it isn't) so that your telco can oversell their connections more. If your neighbor decides to download a big file and your connection is severely oversold, you'll get no bandwidth as long as your neighbor hasn't run into his

In an ideal world, this would be the case. But unfortunately we cannot trust the people in charge to ensure that they are doing nothing more nefarious.Furthermore, what I consider to be priority should be different than what you consider priority. In a classic "Me" vs. "You", why should your VOIP/Skype traffic get any more priority than my WoW traffic? But that's what it would come down.

Many services these days are pushing the bounds of latency and fighting for the priority.

This was what was done with Telcos as part of common carrier status. If it makes sense for your fucking phone, why the fuck doesn't it make sense for the Internet, which, for the most part, runs on the same goddamn networks as your fucking phone.